The typical office worker in a modern work environment is routinely overloaded with information, incoming and outgoing electronic messages, and a variety of work responsibilities scattered among numerous activities. The cognitive demands placed on these individuals are often so great that even the most organized individual finds it difficult to perform up to his or her full potential. One of the leading contributors to sub-optimal performance, whether in a work environment or other environment, is distractions created by electronic messages, such as emails, text messages, instant messages (IMs), telephone calls, and other electronic messages.
The research in this area reveals significant problems. For example, clinical research conducted by Dr. Glenn Wilson, Kings College London University, found that “the IQ of people trying to juggle messages and work fell by ten points—the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.” As another example, Thomas Davenport and John Beck in their book “The Attention Economy” state that “the average U.S. office worker is spending almost half the day in message-related activity. This estimate is consistent with unpublished studies from Ferris Research and Lotus Research on email usage, which found that average white collar workers can typically spend two hours per day on email alone.” As another example, in Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, Steven Robbins calculates that an employee who actually responds to 100 emails each day (at three minutes per response) would need five hours to complete the task.
Many electronic messages have value, but this value may come at a cost to the individual and the organization. For example, when people go off-task to respond to electronic messages, they take time to recall where they were and to reengage, which may cause them to lose momentum after a meeting or phone call and may adversely affect their effective intelligence.